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Of course I'm not forcing you to do anything if you don't want to, but seriously, what have you got to lose? Five seconds of your life?

Yeah, same, I'm willing to do crowds if there's something I'm actually interested in going on (cfe squeezing down the street during Dragocon...). It was definitely worth it in this case!

Durian was pretty weird for me. I did try actual durians in Thailand, and they really... weren't that big a deal? From everything I'd been hearing it seemed like people either find them to be MOST DELICIOUS THING EVER or SIN AGAINST GOD, FRUIT MOST FOUL, but when I ate them, they were... okay? I didn't think they were disgusting, but not my favorite flavor, either. I wouldn't go out of my way to get one again, definitely not worth the expense imo. They do smell pretty strongly, and not pleasantly, but it also wasn't bad enough that I felt like it was going to be sick or anything, and it wasn't anywhere near as lingering as I'd expected.

Part of it might be that there are a lot of different varieties of durian with different characteristics, and the Thai varieties are supposed to be more mild, I think. So perhaps I wasn't getting the full durian experience. All in all it was kind of an underwhelming experience. Those specific durian desserts tasted pretty authentic, although they didn't smell too much. They weren't bad, but I was disappointed they weren't actually mango.

That's awesome! Really nice to be able to work from home, too. I'm just really crossing my fingers for a position in a place where I can take public transit; seriously nobody wants me on the roads, least of all me. =/ I hope your family's car situation improves, though. As tech support, are you strictly answering questions for people, or do you also do any coding or, like, general unfucking of plugin stuff if people screw it up somehow? Like, if someone e-mails you like "help I can no install" do you walk them through how to install, or can you log in and do it for them?

Anyway, I hope that it all goes well for you. It's great that you're working with nice people; that definitely makes a huge difference.

Thanks for the birthday wishes! I was in Hong Kong at the time; visited Japan a couple weeks later.

I did get to do something cool! I wanted to be in Hong Kong for my birthday, because Chinese New Year fell two days before it, and the celebrations go on for several weeks. So I got a parade as a pre-birthday thing (and stood around for three hours to make sure I had a good spot on the route, haha) and then on my actual birthday I went to a well-wishing festival, the centerpiece of which is writing a wish on a piece of paper tied to an orange and throwing it into a tree. If your wish catches on a branch, it'll come true!

These days they use plastic oranges instead of real ones, and you're not allowed to throw them at the actual wishing tree, because so many people attend these days that the tree would get damaged. They set up a fake tree for people to use:

It turns out it's prett hard to throw a hollow plastic orange up into a tree, but I did eventually get mine to stick! Aside from the tree there was a market, lots of stalls with new year's decorations, good luck charms, that kind of thing, and best of all traditional new year's food! Most of it considered to be lucky one way or another. I got to try souffle pancakes for the first time (admittedly not a traditional food) which are basically the best thing ever and I'm sad now that you can't get them around here. I also bought some yellow rice treats thinking they were mango flavored, and they turned out to be durian flavored instead, which was a surprise! Aside from food and gifts there was a shrine where people could pay their respects and wish for good luck, lion dancers going through the crowds periodically, and performances from some of the groups that had participated in the parade. Some of the parade floats were parked there, too. I spent the whole day there and had a fantastic time!

What's up with you? I saw in the mafia thread that you got a new job. Congrats! How's that going?

Great! Amazon pulled a bit of a fake-out on me, since originally it said the mat would come with the figures and the markers would be by themselves, and I just tried to picture you getting the markers, only the markers, first and going "wtf is this." Glad you got some nice minis and they were decent quality, since that does seem to be a problem with prepainted miniatures. Was kind of tempted to throw in one of those giant lots of horrible knock-off pokémon figurines that could also serve as enemies in a campaign, but if you didn't want to do that then you'd just have this giant box of horrible ugly pokémon knock-offs and nothing to do with them. :P